Self-Repair through Reconfiguration: A Requirements Engineering Approach

High variability software systems can deliver their functionalities in multiple ways by reconfiguring their components. High variability has become important because of current trends towards software systems that come in product families, offer high levels of personalization, and fit well within a service-oriented architecture. The purpose of our research is to propose a framework that exploits such variability to allow a software system to self-repair in cases of failure. We propose an autonomic architecture that consists of monitoring, diagnosis, reconfiguration and execution components. This architecture uses requirements models as a basis for monitoring, diagnosis, and reconfiguration. We illustrate our proposal with a medium-sized publicly available case study (an automated teller machine (ATM) simulation), and evaluate its performance through a series of experiments. Our experimental results demonstrate that it is feasible to scale our approach to software systems with medium-size requirements.